Life on the Fringes: A Journey toward Orthodox Ordination. Haviva Ner-David, Jewish Family Life Books, 2000. Review Life on the Fringes is a book of paradoxes. Haviva Ner-David is a traditional, Orthodox, feminist woman seeking ordination as an Orthodox rabbi. She writes movingly of her challenges and struggles, while holding out her ideal-an Orthodoxy that will finally accept her-as the only possible road. Because of the paradoxes of her life, however, the book is also filled with frustrating paradoxes. She argues for covering her head, not her hair, as a married woman, which is clearly out of step with the normative Orthodox understanding. She tries to pursuade that an interpretation of Leviticus allows her to accept homosexuality- again, out of step with normative Orthodoxy. She chose to immerse her new-born Jewish daughter in a mikvah as a covenantal birth ceremony-bringing out traditional images of conversion inappropriate for a new-born Jew from Jewish parentage. She claims to be strictly halachic- except when certain rituals or rules are "sexist", or don't resonate with her personal sense of meaning. One is simply left wondering, at the end of the book, why Ner-David doesn't go to one of the Conservative seminaries and become a Conservative Rabbi. She sounds like she'd make a very good one. Many people hear "Orthodox feminist" and say "Impossible! Oxymoron!" On the one hand, non-Orthodox feminists may wonder how someone can be truly feminist and still accept the restrictions on women's public religious roles and all of the underlying halachic notions of what Jewish women and men can and cannot, should and should not do. They question the "language of permission" used by Orthodox women: if the male rabbinic authorities of the Talmud or subsequent halachic literature tell us we can (or cannot), then we can (or cannot) wear a tallit, put on tefillin, be counted in a minyan, etc. They challenge the idea that there can be any "separate but equal" for women, just as for blacks or Asians. On the other hand, many Orthodox Jews will wonder why someone who is committed to halacha is willing in any way to bend the rules, change the rules, or adapt the rules. They cannot see why a woman who already performs her own mitzvot, like mikvah, needs or wants or even should perform "men's" mitzvot like tallis and tefilin. Ner-David has a rich array of friends, both Orthodox and liberal, who play out these paradoxes in study halls and social circles. A place like our Kolel can, indeed desires to foster such dialogue. With all of its shortcomings, Life on the Fringes is worth reading, because it starts and continues the on-going conversations about women and Judaism for all of us who take this issue seriously. Like the documentary Half the Kingdom, it puts us in the room with differing opinions, and then lets us work it out ourselves.

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